The Prophet Motive (9 page)

“Step to the right,” said the man. John entered a brightly lit living room with a burgundy carpet. It felt plush under his feet. “Stop right there.” John halted. Framed photographs of the Sierras hung on the walls. The windows had curtains. There was a small fireplace. The ivory sofa’s new leather smell mixed with stale cigarette smoke.

“Nice digs,” John said. “Sure beats the hell out of the Men’s Guest Quarters.”

“Put your hands on top of your head, and hold still.”

John obeyed. “Shouldn’t you be reading me my Miranda rights?” The man searched his person top to bottom, removed John’s wallet, his chewing gum, and the Swiss army knife.

After rifling through the wallet, the man told him to take back his possessions and sit down. John took a spot on the sofa, behind a cup-shaped glass coffee table that also served as a tank for neon-bright tropical fish. The man paced nervously.

Scattered across the surface of the table were an empty bottle of Beck’s beer, a half-empty bowl of nachos, a butt-laden ashtray, a pack of Marlboro cigarettes, and a Bic lighter.

John had been told on the bus that alcohol and tobacco use were strictly prohibited at Natural High Farms. But he also knew that, like communists, some cultists were more equal than others.

A curvy redhead of college age stumbled sleepily into the living room wearing nothing—absolutely nothing—but flowered panties. “What’s going on out here?”

“Go back to bed, Karen,” the man said. “Be in shortly.”

She looked John up and down. “He’s not joining us, is he?”

“No,” the man said.

“Good.” She started back for the bedroom.

John called after her. “It’s these overalls. They make me look huge.”

“My name is Tom Mahorn,” said the man, his eyes riveting on John’s. “You might think of me as the head of security.”

“Okay.”

“What were you doing outside?”

“Just getting some fresh air. You see, buddy, I’ve got insomnia, and when I can’t sleep it helps, sometimes, if I get a little fresh air.”

Mahorn rubbed his forehead. “That’s right, you’re the one with the insomnia . . .”

“You must’ve been at the lecture tonight. Wow! What a fuckin’ trip, huh! How the fuck did he do that? How the fuck?”

“How did you get outside?”

“What do you mean?”

“How did you unlock the door to the Men’s Guest Quarters?”

“The door wasn’t locked, I just walked out.”

Mahorn rushed into the foyer. John heard him throw open the outside door and call down to the bottom of the stairs.

“Brother Mike! Radio Brother Gary to check out the lock on the Men’s Guest Quarters. I want to know what condition it’s in. Tell him to step on it.”

Mahorn returned to the living room, where he remained standing. “We always lock the doors on the guest dormitories.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because our guests don’t know the system around here, that’s why. They might wander off in the dark and bump into some farm animals, or farm machinery, or something, and hurt themselves. We could be sued.”

“What’s with the flood lights?” John asked. “And why do you need armed guards?”

“Our sentries protect against intruders,” Mahorn said, stepping closer. “Intruders from outside and inside.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Don’t, huh?” Mahorn stepped closer still. “Ever hear of David Pollini?”

“No.”

“Ezra Dean?”

John shook his head. Mahorn took another step forward and bent down at the waist, putting his face inches from John’s own. “You sure you’ve never heard of Ezra?”

“No. I don’t know either of those people. Who are they?”

“People who wish to do us harm.”

“Why?”

Mahorn straightened and belched. “Misguided. It’s a long story.” He took a seat in a black leather armchair. “So tell me about yourself.”

John launched into his biker cover story. Minutes later, he heard a pair of feet pounding up the outside steps. Mahorn left to answer the door.

Quickly, John pulled the cuff of his shirtsleeve over his right hand. With cloth-covered fingertips, he lifted the lighter off the coffee table and slid it into one of his pockets.

He overheard the sentry—who Mahorn called, for whatever reason, “Brother Mike”—reporting. “Door to the Men’s Guest Quarters unlocked. Appears to be in normal condition.”

“Wait here, I’ll bring him out,” Mahorn said. From the foyer he returned to the living room. “Okay, you’re going back to the dormitory.”

Outside, at the top of the stairs, Mahorn gave John’s shoulder a pat and smiled. “Our security measures are vitally important, trust me.”

John nodded. “Okay, man.”

“I hope we haven’t frightened you into leaving us.”

“Naw, I’ll stick around. Come all this way. But after the boot camp’s over, I’ve got to get back to San Fran pretty quick.”

“Beautiful city.”

“Ever been there?”

“Just recently, in fact. Good night.”

Mahorn shut the door fast, eager to get some sleep, or else some Karen. Brother Mike escorted John back toward the guest quarters, apologizing for the earlier rough treatment.

At the edge of the central complex, facing the woods, Brother Mike put a hand in front of John’s chest, gesturing him to stop, and spoke to another sentry sitting inside a Checkpoint Charley style guard shack. “Coming through,” he said.

“Gotcha,” the sentry said. But there was no gate to open.

As they resumed walking, John recalled that the same exchange had occurred on the way into the complex. “Why did we have to stop just now?”

“The perimeter protection system had to be turned off so we could pass through without setting off the alarm.”

“But I don’t see anything,” John said. “What kind of security system do you have?”

“That’s classified information.”

Paranoia
, John thought. A common cult characteristic. Us versus them all the time. Paranoia was dangerous. He’d seen it in action before. It could drive you out of San Francisco and into the jungles of Guyana. It could drive you out of your mind.

They entered the trail through the woods leading to the dormitories. It was unlit. Brother Mike produced a flashlight. Along the way, John recalled something the psychologist had told him about cults in general and that he still remembered more than dimly from his time inside the People’s Temple.

“Cults are composed of rigid hierarchies,” she’d said. “Just as in the military. And the chance to move up in the hierarchy motivates cult members to follow orders.”

It made sense that a high-ranking cult member had conducted the dormitory search of personal belongings and reported directly to the cult leader. The Wizard, after all, would want to limit the number of followers who knew that he was merely a man. A man pulling levers behind a curtain.

It also made sense that at least one of the two men who had, for whatever reason, swiped the body of Esperanza Chavez in San Francisco would’ve been a high-ranking cult member. Bringing her back, dead or alive, had been important for some reason. Tom Mahorn admitted to being in San Francisco recently. Tom Mahorn had been whispering with The Wizard before the lecture. Tom fit the physical description for being Daryl Finck’s partner.

“G’night,” John said to Brother Mike at the door to his dormitory. He stepped inside, shut the door, and listened to it being locked from the outside before stealing through the dark, past the bunk beds, past the showers. He opened a small storage closet near the bathroom stalls.

With his knife he snipped a square of clear plastic from a bundle of toilet paper rolls. He used it to wrap the cigarette lighter he’d stolen from Tom Mahorn, protecting the object from contamination or new fingerprints. Then he tore off a small strip of duct tape, entered one of the stalls, and strapped the lighter against the underside of the toilet tank.

Finally, and at long last, he fell into his bed. His rest would be hellishly brief, he had no doubt, for the psychologist had told him fatigue was the best brainwashing tool of them all.

Fat, pink blisters marred Marilyn’s soft palms and fingers, and the rope that kept her from falling to Earth burned like fire in her hands as she descended, trying not to look down.

The Eco-Warrior Boot Camp had officially begun after breakfast. The new recruits had spent the last three hours crawling up and down the sheer face of a rocky palisade, learning how to rappel, supposedly so that they might one day hang immense banners of environmental protest on skyscrapers, or across dams. Two skilled instructors, Bernie and Debbie, were teaching them. The Wizard himself had recently arrived to observe.

“Okay, everyone, that’s a wrap!” Debbie called as Marilyn touched down on the ground. “Now let’s help fold up the gear!”

The recruits cheered. After the gear had all been packed, the instructors handed out fresh water bottles, and The Wizard assembled everyone in the wild grass at the base of the palisade.

They sat cross-legged in a circle, all but The Wizard still drenched with sweat. To Marilyn’s left, three spots away, sat a weary John, his spine the letter
C
, his mouth a flattened
O
, his half-hooded gaze empty.

Had he slept at all last night? And how had he explained his escape from a locked dormitory? His prowling outside?

She couldn’t wait to hear. She was surprised he hadn’t been put on a Greyhound bus back to San Francisco.

The Wizard said, “Now we’re going to conduct a little exercise, designed to expand each of our human potentials. We call it, ‘What Weighs Me Down?’ We’re going to explore the very beginning of your lives. Each of you will be asked, in turn, to contemplate your earliest childhood memories.

“You’ll be asked to share something traumatic that happened to you back then, something that—if you’re being totally honest with yourself—still affects you to this very day, still weighs you down, still causes you tremendous grief or pain or anger or resentment. You have to rid yourself of this excess baggage, if you want your soul to fly, and if you truly want to become a kick-ass environmentalist.”

He asked Bernie, the rappelling instructor, to begin the exercise. Bernie crawled on all fours to the center of the circle, then sat cross-legged, closing his eyes in contemplation. A full minute passed in silence before he opened them.

“Okay, what weighs me down is the way my mother favored my younger brother, Tommy. He was a very cute and adorable little tyke. Me, I was a little strange looking, even without the big ears. Still am, I guess, but that’s no reason to treat me like a second class son.

“One time . . . Oh, this is painful! One time I saw Tommy draw with crayons on the refrigerator door. I told my mother. But automatically she thought I was lying. She thought I did it. And that’s not fair! That’s simply not fair! You see, my parents were teaching me, from a young age, to value outward, physical beauty above inner, spiritual beauty.

“So I grew up secretly hating myself for being physically unattractive. Hating myself! It wasn’t until I came here to this pure and blessed place, and began my studies—Under the wisest man to walk the Earth since Jesus Christ himself!—that I was able to get my values ordered correctly. And finally, finally, finally, I’ve started to really, truly, love myself!”

The Wizard led the clapping. “Thanks for sharing.”

How nauseating
, Marilyn thought.
But how predictable
.

Due to a not-so-subtle system of reward and punishment, Bernie had re-written his own personal history in the manner of cult followers everywhere. Say you love your mother and you’re a liar or a fool. Say she molested you and earn big hugs. Praise the cult, or the cult leader, and earn more big hugs, but prepare to be shouted down, shunned, or beaten for the slightest criticism of either. Past bad. Present good. The system maintained a strong wedge between cult members and their former lives. By now Bernie had probably come to believe his own lies and distortions.

Next, it was Debbie, the other instructor, who crawled to the center of the circle, to repeat, in essence:
Everything about my past is bad, only here can my life be good, and although I’m still broken, The Wizard is fixing me
.

The new recruits began taking their turns in the center of the circle, stuttering and stumbling through their confessional tales. These stories weren’t the kind usually told to strangers.

Kira, the German college student, described lying in her bed at night as a small child and listening to her parents scream at each other from another part of the house.

“Sometimes,” she said, “I would hear one of them say my name, and I would think it was all my fault they were fighting.”

“Wow!” Bernie said. “Your parents were so self-absorbed!”

“That’s child abuse!” Debbie said.

Past bad
.
Present good
.